Quote Of The Day #85

“I have a very simple idea. It is old fashioned – old Labour. If someone is in Parliament, he or she should be elected. I was brought up to believe that democracy meant that we elected people and could get rid of them.“ [My emphasis]

Tony Benn was a member of the Wilson and Callaghan Labour governments in the 1960s and 1970s and the de facto leader of the Labour left in the 1980s. He only failed to unseat Dennis Healey as deputy leader of the Labour Party in 1981 by the narrowest of margins; it is an interesting counterfactual to imagine what might have occurred had he won that elected and gone on to challenge Michael Foot for the party leadership.

Some readers will no doubt raise an eyebrow at my sharing a quote from Benn. He can certainly be accused of hypocrisy in his personal financial dealings but surely no-one can doubt his commitment to democracy and opposition to the unelected House of lords – he personally renounced a hereditary peerage to remain in the House of Commons. I’ve used Benn’s five essential questions of democracy before but it’s worth repeating them here…

“1/ What power do you have?

2/ Where did you get it from?

3/ In whose interest do you exercise it?

4/ To whom are you accountable?

5/ How can we get rid of you? “ [My emphasis]

It’s the final question I really want to discuss.

I’ve made the point before that one remarkable thing about the Covid19 lockdown is that it has exposed just how many useless mouths the taxpayer is feeding. Government ‘advisors,’ NGOs (nongovernmental organisations) and just plain hangers-on are being paid vast amounts of money for very little actual work. But top of this list is the bloated, undemocratic, corrupt, 800+ member House of Lords. Recently, I’ve heard interventions by the Lord Speaker Norman Fowler, a member of Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet more than thirty years ago and by Lord Norman Lamont, John Major’s hapless Chancellor who was fired from the government in 1993. We simply cannot seem to get rid of these people and they cost £323 a day! I wrote a piece just last month about Boris Johnson’s hilariously corrupt ‘honours’ list – Time to End the House of Lords.

The trouble is Benn comes from a time when to be ‘left’ was to care about the economic, social and cultural wellbeing of ordinary working-class people rather than the toileting arrangements of middle-class ‘women’ with penises but no cervix. It is a shocking sign of how far to the right (*see below) the centre of politics has shifted in the past forty years that support for the neoliberal European Union – an organisation that has always favoured capital over labour – is now considered a ‘left-wing’ position. Real, principled left-wingers like Tony Benn, Michael Foot and Peter Shore were bitterly opposed to the undemocratic (even antidemocratic) EEC/EU and Labour went into the 1983 general election with the pledge to leave without a referendum – see Brexit: Left or Right?

I agree entirely with Benn’s “old fashioned” ideas about democracy and I think it is shameful and embarrassing that in the third decade of the twenty-first century, Britain still has members of parliament who are there because a distant ancestress slept with Charles II, as representatives of Henry VIII’s dying church or because they happen to be pals with a previous prime minister. What we need is not less democracy but more and I set out my ideas for the complete reform of the UK constitution in A Proposal for Change in October 2017. In that post I wrote that “the House of Lords is so ludicrous, so anachronistic, so corrupt that it cannot be reformed, only ended.” To answer Benn’s fifth question, the only way to “get rid” of the Lords is to abolish the entire rotten institution.

* Some people might take issue with my saying that the centre of politics has moved to the right. But so far as I can see, all the major parties accept the neoliberal status quo in economics. I do not consider support for conservative religionists who happen to be non-white, identity politics or niche ‘Woke’ issues to be left-wing. And they are certainly not Marxist. Like Julian the Apostate, I feel that the left has been taken over by a religious cult.